Throughout the year, we all have particular events that mark the passage of time. Birthdays, holidays, special events. As professors, we have a few unique days too: some fun, some not. There’s the first day of classes, where we still (20+ years in) get the jitters. The last day of classes, when we are often just as, if not more excited, than the students. And then there is the day our course evaluations arrive.
Typical of many universities, the courses we teach have an anonymous evaluation at the end. These are usually a combination of multiple-choice questions that ask students to rate components of the class on a scale and open-ended questions that allow for additional feedback. In theory, the purpose of these evaluations is to provide useful feedback to the professor. In reality, they do not do that at all.
Instead, they have become a place to say all of the things unsaid throughout the semester. We have gotten comments that range from genuinely kind to downright cruel. As much as we would like to focus on the positive feedback, we don’t because we are human.
Like anyone else, we fall prey to negativity bias. That no matter how much good feedback there is, we fixate on the few negative comments. This is literally just part of how our brains are wired. Neuroscientists think that focusing on the bad is actually an evolutionary advantage that allows us to avoid harm. We know it exists, and yet it is hard to avoid.
Because we are who we are, we wanted to understand why it is that course evaluations, and other places where anonymity is guaranteed, are rife with mean comments. Think about all of the places people now have an opportunity to hide behind a username and opine, and you begin to understand how the social web has become such a cesspool. This same cruelty has infiltrated restaurant reviews, product ratings, book reviews, news stories, performance reviews at work, and even recipes. Deep down, we know these mean reviews and nasty comments hurt. So why do we do them? It turns out there are several specific things that lead people to troll others online.
What Feeds the Trolls in Us?
The Online Disinhibition Effect
When people feel anonymous and unaccountable, the normal “rules” of polite society don’t seem to apply. Research has found (unsurprisingly) that anonymous commenters are significantly more likely to post vulgar, rude and hateful comments than non-anonymous commenters.
Lower Perceived Consequences
Anonymous posters have a false sense of confidence that they will not be caught and some believe that online messages aren’t permanent. We would like to point out that both of these conclusions are incorrect. The sleuths of the internet have powers to uncover anything, so we would suggest that you assume nothing you post is ever truly anonymous and that once you post something it is never going to actually go away.
Part of this confidence may stem from their ability to put “space” between them and their target to allow them to engage in these behaviors and still sleep at night. This act of mental gymnastics is called moral disengagement and it helps us justify certain behaviors by tricking ourselves into thinking they are ok. We now even have research to show that moral disengagement leads adolescents to engage in cyberbullying.
Personality Factors
We know that not everyone engages in this type of behavior and that’s because the desire to anonymously troll others online is linked to specific personality traits known as the Dark Triad as well as a lack of empathy. The Triad includes sadism, psychopathy, and Machiavellianism, which often lead to maladaptive social and emotional processing.
Real Life Consequences
Being subjected to unkind anonymous feedback has actual consequences. As professors who have been in academia for a while, we have (mostly) learned how to move past the mean comments, but these evaluations are still part of our annual reviews and impact our raises and our identities. In the case of businesses, these mean-spirited comments can damage their credibility as a business and impact their competitive rankings.
None of these psychological traits or mechanisms excuse this behavior, but they do provide some idea of why it happens. But now the question is, what do we move past them because they aren’t going away?
How to Put Our Trolls to Sleep
- Practice empathy. The power of giving anonymous reviews and comments can be intoxicating, but we suggest that you spare a moment to think of the subject of your review. How would you expect your words to affect them? Is that your intent?
- Who are you? Remember: your comments say as much about you as they do about your subject. Be true to yourself and you will likely be kinder.
- Focus on outcomes. Take a moment to consider what change you hope to achieve through your review. For example, calling us mean (or worse) in an evaluation may hurt our feelings, but it will not change our behavior. Give us something specific to work with. Are we putting too many due dates on top of each other? Do we tend to interrupt students when they are asking questions? These kinds of specific comments are welcome because they help us to be better.
- Be factual. It is tempting to be hyperbolic when giving feedback. But really: do we never answer student emails? Comments like this tend to be disregarded because we know that they are untrue.
It can be a frustrating world out there, and you can’t stay bottled up all the time. Sometimes you need to let it out. But please, if you need to get something off your chest, try to counterbalance that vitriol with a dose of kindness.